A lesson still to be learnt from the Nazi past in Germany: Occupation is not peace
Tatjana Tönsmeyer – University of Wuppertal
These days, in autumn 2024, public debate in Germany evolves around several issues, with “peace” featuring among them prominently. Already during the EU parliamentary election campaign earlier this year the German chancellor Olaf Scholz (although he was not a candidate in these elections) appeared on advertisements with the slogan “To Secure Peace, Vote SPD”. In the late summer, in elections in the three federal states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, “peace” again was on the political billboards. This time it was especially prominent in the campaign by the AfD, the far-right ”Alternative für Deutschland” and by a new party, the “Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht” (BSW). Founded in January 2024, the BSW is named after its most prominent personality, Sahra Wagenknecht, who was formerly a member of the so-called “communist platform” and has now broken away from the leftist party “Die Linke”. Politically the BSW combines a leftwing socio-economic approach with rightwing socio-cultural tendencies. One of their election posters read “Diplomacy instead of warmongering”. Following inconclusive election results and no democratic party willing to enter into a coalition with the extremist AfD, the BSW might well find itself in government. Promoting “peace” is high on their agenda and is to be achieved among other measures by stopping the arms supply for Ukraine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both the BSW and the AfD are Russia-friendly to the point of acting as multipliers of pro-Russian propaganda.
Very well (or not that well), readers might think, but why is “peace” and the election campaigns of two German political parties – the AfD and the BSW – an issue for an academic blog on occupation? It is, I am going to argue, because this kind of “peace talk” and its approval by parts of the electorate reflect a substantial gap in knowledge about occupation. This in turn leads to oversimplifying the dichotomy between war and peace in broader public discourse, conveying the idea that all is well if the fighting stops, as soldiers and civilians will then no longer die. It is, in a nutshell, how most Germans experienced the end of the Second World War in May 1945. And this experience, transmitted to subsequent generations and mirrored in national and cultural memories, though unreflected in that the peculiarity of the experience is not fully understood, still impacts German politics.
In contrast to such popular memories, historians of German Second World War occupations will know, as Tony Judt has put it, that outside Germany, this war was “primarily a civilian experience” and in essence a “war of occupation”. As a consequence, according to Judt, the number of civilian dead exceeded military losses in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Greece. In Europe, it was Germany and the UK, both war societies, where military losses significantly outnumbered civilians. As the fighting in the countries invaded and occupied by Germany was often rather short – e.g. less than two months in Poland which was then followed by more than five long years of occupation – in many countries most of the civilians lost their lives not from aerial bombing or during the land campaigns because they lived near the battle fronts, but due to occupation atrocities.
It is widely unknown to the broader public in Germany that in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany, most of the victims were civilians who died because of occupation violence. The same is true regarding the fact that occupation impacted upon the everyday life of ordinary people. It may come as a surprise that there is so little public knowledge and awareness of this in Germany, the country that prides itself (with good reasons) for its efforts in coming to terms with the past. But a brief look at school textbooks underlines this point. In Germany they are a matter for the federal states. Those used in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state, for example, focus on the Nazi rise to power and the loss of democracy, the war, and German crimes, especially the Shoah. While this choice is well-founded, occupation does not feature as an issue. The only exception I have found is a German-Polish school textbook in which occupation was included following a suggestion by the Polish authors; but unfortunately, this book is rarely used.
A blog entry like this does not allow for a more detailed analysis of school textbooks, nor the broader German debate. Nevertheless the most important general lesson taught and learnt from history in German schools is: “Nie wieder!” – Never again – meaning “Never again war“ and “Never again Auschwitz“. This lesson is echoed in the German government’s stand vis-à-vis Israel after the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 and the slogan “Never again is now”. It has been mirrored for years in arms export policies that restrict and limit the sale of weapons – only after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine have these policies been withdrawn slowly step by step (and are far from unequivocal, as the election campaigns show). And it is reflected in the lack of a broader understanding of what occupation means for those concerned. To put it in a nutshell: “Never again occupation” is not a lesson that Germans have learnt from their history.
When first asked by the editors of this blog to write about occupation, as I have led two international source editing projects and published a book on Europe under German occupation, they invited me to focus on my own research and suggest ideas for further important research areas. All my previous endeavors share the conviction that it is important to research how ordinary people tried to adopt to the “new normal” of occupation, how they handled vulnerability, tried to make do with shortages regarding foodstuffs, medicine, housing, heating etc., fought for their values (and be it only in private), dealt with shattered routines, managed their stressful lives, the fatigue, the desperation, the fear – and prepared for postwar times. Even though it is sometimes painful still today to look at why some of the occupied grasped the opportunities offered by a brutal occupier, this is part of the wider picture as well, both generally, and because it is the context in which the Jewish populations tried to survive genocidal persecution.
There is still research to be done in these (and other) areas. One of the most important questions these days might nevertheless be how to reach out to broader audiences. Even if history does not repeat itself, knowing about Second World War occupations and what they meant to 230 million Europeans – including the population of Ukraine – and knowing how deeply they affected everyday life, might resonate when trying to understand what is at stake in more recent occupations, including the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. There is good reason to fear for the civilian population.
References
Tony Judt, Post War. A History of Europe Since 1945, New York 2005.
Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stefan Martens und Irina Sherbakova (eds), Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe. A Source Edition (2 vols.), Leiden/Boston 2021.
Online Portal ‘Societies under German occupation’ https://societiesundergermanoccupation.uni-wuppertal.de.
Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Unter deutscher Besatzung. Europa 1939-1945, München 2024.
Aviel Roshwald, Occupied. European & Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937-1945, Cambridge 2023.
Katerina Sergatskova,‘Die Besatzung verändert das Leben für immer‘ in Mittelweg 36 33/2024, vol. 1, 54-69.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko, ‘Terror, collaboration and resistance. Russian rule in the newly occupied territories of Ukraine’ in Eurozine 2023 – https://www.eurozine.com/terror-collaboration-and-resistance.
Tatjana Tönsmeyer, ‘Vernichtungskrieg und deutsche Besatzung im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Von sagbarkeitsregimen, Meistererzählungen und erinnerungspolitischen Fehlstellen‘, in Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Erinnerungskämpfe. Neueres Deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein, Stuttgart 2023, 154-174 (de Gruyter, forthcoming in English in 2025).
Photo credits:
Cover picture: German police recording names of Poles imprisoned in a German camp in occupied Łódź during World War II.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
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